Revenance, a New Theory of Horror?

Or, how our attitudes toward the past dictate our feelings about horror

Heads up: today’s post isn’t about a particular work of horror art. It’s more of a theory piece.

A few months ago, I found myself writing about revenants—draugrs—or zombies. Even though I am not, dispositionally, a very zombie-forward kind of horror critic, I have noticed that I’m somehow really clinging to the idea of revenants. I have the sense that my stuckness on this idea—of dead things somehow coming back to participate in the present—has to do with my own philosophy of horror, and with why horror has such cultural power. I’m going to try to think through revenance today.

Horror is, I have always believed, a genre of art that situates itself fundamentally in human vulnerability. It’s got that in common with tragedy. In horror, as in tragedy, we see what’s happening to the protagonists, and we feel afraid because we can imagine those things happening to us: like the heroes of the story, we are mortal, we are frail, we are weaker than the monster or demon or wraith or draugr that is bearing down upon the hero. Horror allows readers and viewers to practice vulnerability, to lean deep into it, to feel the desperation, the pull of mortal terror. But since horror is a form of art, it allows us to feel all of that in an aestheticized, relatively safe way. We are not, in fact, going to get raped by Satan, sliced up by Freddie Kruger, or eaten by a xenomorph on LV426. We know that, cognitively. But the power of horror lies in how it exploits the sensory resources of literary and dramatic art—sound design, word choice, rhythm, timing, acting, camera angles, props, and direction—to make the action in the story seem to jump out of the story and into our bodies. Horror, as so many horror theorists have noted, is a bodily genre, one that produces a physiological response.

People who like horror generally like the embodied, physiological practice at vulnerability; people who don’t like horror, don’t. I’ve thought a lot about that dissection, because people who like horror tend to really, really like horror; people who don’t like it tend to really, really not like it. Once in a while you meet a person who doesn’t care for the genre, but will watch it in a pinch; once in a while you meet someone who likes the genre in a general way, but won’t preferentially search for horror titles on their streaming services. So what’s up with that? Why are some people vulnerability junkies, and some not?

For a while, I thought maybe it was childhood trauma. People who had been through a lot, and who therefore had embodied, personal knowledge of the importance of practicing at vulnerability in safe ways would naturally like horror. But then I talked with some people—trauma survivors—who hated horror, for exactly the same reason: no need to practice a kind of vulnerability, they felt, that they had more than enough lived exposure to already.

Then I thought maybe it’s a strictly neurochemical thing. Maybe people whose uptake rate of serotonin or dopamine is slow, and who therefore require higher risk and higher danger stimulation in life like horror—there are cognitive neuroscience data to show that slow dopamine uptake increases risk tolerance and thrill-seeking behaviors, as a friend of mine recently reminded me. But no: a lot of the people I know who love horror are profoundly risk-intolerant in their real lives, preferring instead to do all their thrill-seeking on screens and in novels, and sometimes in verse or on canvas.

Now I have a new theory, and it’s one I quite like, though I’m not sure it’s true. Part of the reason I like it is that, if I’m right, it would help to explain why so many medievalists I know (and I know, like, a really large lot of them) like horror—myself included.  The theory has to do with revenance. Not with revenants, per se, not with zombies qua monsters. But with the phenomenon of return, things that should be dead, over and done with, coming back into some kind of action, presence, or immediacy.  I think it may be the case that people who tend to like horror are people who, on a deep, gut level, accept the idea that the past is never really over. That nothing is ever really done. That the “present” and the “future” don’t have independent existence apart from the “past.” History isn’t dead; it’s now. And it’s tomorrow.

Medievalists are trained to think this way, in part because of how—at least in the European, Christian Middle Ages, which is my own area of central focus—medieval people understood Christian time. The Crucifixion of Jesus, as a prime example, had demonstrably happened in the past. But that didn’t mean it wasn’t still ongoing; as Julian of Norwich (a great 15^th century horror writer in her own right) well understood, the passion is a historical event that is happening “continually,” and that will continue to happen into the future—at least until Judgement Day. That’s part of how medieval Christians believed they could rely on divine salvation; Christ’s self-sacrifice recurred for them every time they went to Church and partook of the Eucharist. Put rather crassly, Jesus was the ultimate revenant: he was undead, even though a huge group of witnesses saw him die; he came back from the crypt to talk among humans again. He came back. That’s, like, the central promise of Christianity: revenance.

But moving away from medieval Christian doctrine, which many of you may find less than totally relatable, this idea exists nowadays, especially in poetry. In fact, one of the major themes you’ll encounter if you do a serious survey of late 20^th and early 21^st century radical feminist poetry is precisely the idea that history is never over. It’s never done. The past is not, in fact, passed. Time accumulates; it’s accretive. Look at Anne Carson’s luminous book Nox; look at Lyn Hejinian’s dazzling book My Life; look at Myung Mi Kim’s glorious triptych of books Commons, Penury, and Civil Bound; look at Evie Shockley’s phosphorescent The New Black. In all of those works, it’s crystal clear that the very idea that history ends, or passes, or is over. The idea that the “present” is somehow pristine, ennobled, and autonomous, is not only descriptively wrong, but extremely politically pernicious. Pretending the past is over erases historical trauma, erases eras of oppression, erases the long, scorpion-like tail of patriarchy and misogyny throughout history. Radical feminist poets are well aware that pretending the present is an island unto itself, somehow “freed” from prior time, is anti-feminist because it silences a whole history of suffering. And more crucially, it blinds us to the fact that that whoel history of suffering is constantly self-reenacting. It’s happening now and now and now again.

History’s very nature is constantly to reassert itself, to come back. History is the ultimate revenant. “Zombie time” is not a lost track of a lost collaborative album between Ozzy Osbourne and MC Hammer; it’s an accurate description of how history works: it’s always coming back for us, from the dead.

Recently, there have been some works of horror that grapple with this idea of temporal revenance in a sustained and deliberate way. Netflix’s stunningly good Archive 81 is currently my favorite. In it, an archivist and restorer of analog recordings (cassettes, video tapes) gets hired by a covert company to do a stealth restoration project on a hoard of tapes. As he does so, he finds that the events he learns about from them, which took place 20-25 years in the past, are tethered to him, to his own life, to his present. And, of course, it’s highly appropriate that this guy is an archivist: the fundamental premise of archival scholarship is that there’s something meaningful and valuable in bringing written or recorded objects or ideas that are materially lodged in the past—be that material lodging analog tapes or medieval parchments—into the present. The main character in Archive 81 is suited by his training and by his disposition to make the eerie discoveries he makes, because he always already knows, through his craft, that you can bring the material reality of the past into the present. Revenance.

Black Mirror’s first episode of the second season, “Joan is Awful,” works over a similarly rich philosophical vein. In that episode, there is a seemingly almost infinite regression of people who are forced to witness their own recent lives somehow transformed into current content on a streaming service. The characters watch themselves played by actors, who do they things they themselves had done the day before. The past isn’t over; it just keeps happening, almost recursively, forever, whether we want it to or not.  The second episode of the season, “Loch Henry,” works over the same ideas, shifted a bit, so that a vicious, psychopathic serial killer from the past starts doing her work all over again, seemingly triggered by the dredging up of an old analog recording of her past violence. Revenance.

Not just in Archive 81 and Black Mirror, the idea of revenance is very important to horror writ large. In some subgenres, its importance is very obvious. The whole zombie genre, for example. Or the unkillable bad guy genre—like The Terminator. But it’s also quietly animating all horror films or stories about hauntings, possessions, stalkers, serial killers, or curses. So that covers quite a lot of the horror genre broadly, from The Exorcist to The Shining, from The Haunting of Bly Manor to The Haunting of Hill House. From Nightmare on Elm Street to the Friday the 13th franchise. From Fear Street toStranger Things. The most literal figuration of this trope of the inescapability of the past may come in It Follows, a recent feminist horror film that essentially allegorizes sexually transmitted diseases as a murderous horror phenomenon, whereby someone else’s physical, bodily history is passed—lethally—to the next person that person has sex with.  The past does not die. It keeps coming back.

Horror, I’m going to venture, is then an anti-progress genre. I don’t mean that it’s politically retrograde—it’s often not that. Instead, I mean that in the sense that it resists presentism. It resists linear progress narratives. It resists the idea that we can jettison the past and look forward to a clean, tidy, “better” future. Think back to the ending of Another Earth, from my recent post. Think back to the recursive ending of The Tenant. Or even the ending of Repulsion. Think of the entire Alien franchise. Or, for that matter, the Conjuring franchise. The past doesn’t let any of us go, ever.

So now, I think—or at least I think that I think—that maybe what makes some people like horror and some people not is their attitude toward the past. People who believe and feel deeply in their bones that the past is essentially coterminous with the present—and I’d count myself among this group in a big way, not just because I’m a medievalist who also studies contemporary American culture, but also because of my own life experiences—are drawn to horror like moths to a flame. People who believe time and experience are well and truly linear, causal, laminar, and discreet maybe don’t. People who are revenance-forward like horror; people who are revenance-doubters dislike it.

I’m not sure I’m right about this, but from the people I’ve polled so far, the theory holds at least some water. Paid subscribers, please let me know your thoughts in the comments!

Meanwhile, happy “new” year…